The Moz Blog

5 Incentives You Can Use for Online Marketing

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

The word 'incentive' is defined as a ‘positive motivational influence’. The purpose of this post is to explore the different kinds of user behaviour that can be encouraged with incentives. Although this will hopefully include links as a helpful byproduct, the advice focuses more on increasing user interaction and engagement.

1. Let's Get Competitive

If you run a site that thrives on user generated content (or you're thinking of adding this feature to your site but aren't sure where to start), then this is one technique to increase interaction from users. In forums, competitive behavior occurs naturally as users try to achieve various levels of status within the community. Other sites can mimic this behavior (and the consequential engagement it brings) but they may need a structure to help it along. Here are a few ideas:

- if you have a product or place that you want reviews for, feature a 'Review of the week' (don't forget to email them to let them know they're featured!). It's up to you how far you want to take this- why not take your top 5 reviewers out for dinner once a month?
- take a leaf out of Trusted Places' book and create badges for Local Experts
- follow SEOmoz's example and create a leader board that is powered off thumbs

Any of these incentives could be turbo-charged by adding a followed link back to the user's site.

2. Feature your users

Allowing guest posts, or even 'guest content', on your site is a great way to let your users know how much you value them. If a site I spent time on came to me and asked me to write a feature for them because they valued my input up to now, I'd be bowled over (yeah, I know, it doesn't take much).

If you'd rather not put the time into contacting individual users, try just putting a button on your site that invites guest posts or pitches. Savvy bloggers will be in touch before too long and you'll give off great vibes implying how much you value your users.

3. Donate to charity

Promising you’ll donate to a charity if someone links to your site feels a bit mafia-esque to me. Seeing as donations are a slightly gray area anywhere, I’d advise going after other kinds of beneficial user behaviour. For example, a client of ours donates about $5 to charity every time someone reviews his product. You could also use this method to acquire usability feedback, UGC and email newsletter sign ups.

How to do it

Have a look at your site and decide where it is this tactic could be useful. Ideally, users will be very close to interacting in these ways already- the charity angle just serves to push them into action.

Depending on what you're after, present the donation option when the user is in the right place to action it. For example, it would be much more effective to ask for a review of a product once someone has actually bought one! Similarly, why not ask for usability feedback when the user leaves the site, sweetening the deal with a promise to donate if they acquiesce.

You should definitely have a dedicated page that describes what you're doing, why you're doing it and how much you've raised. Include a link to this in any relevant call-to-action.

If possible, have a small list of charities that you donate to and let users choose which one they’d like the money to go to.

Once you've had the donations up and running successfully for a few weeks, let the charity know what you’re doing and suggest they might like to link to you to verify the process for your users. Win win.

Make the process as shareable as possible: ask if the user would like their friends to know about how they can make a free donation to charity.

A word of warning: even though this isn't an opportunistic scam and allows everyone- you, the charity and your users- to benefit, some people will have a problem with it. Make sure to be careful and respectful at all times.

4. Product Giveaway

If you have an ecommerce site, do you have any small, cheapish products that you could send to bloggers to get them to review? If you do, then this is a great way to build relationships with bloggers in your niche and encourage them to talk (hopefully positively) about your company. I wrote a whole thing on how to go about doing this, but then Rob pointed out he'd blogged about it a couple of weeks ago- so have a read of his post about Link Building for Small eCommerce Sites

5. Competitions and Prize Draws

Competitions are a really adaptable way of incentivizing certain types of user behavior. Here are just a few examples that we've seen recently:

- To get email sign ups - Fat Face- Win A Camper Van (very viral- has a 'refer a friend' draw as well)
- To sign up to a newsletter- Silksleep.com - win a silk blanket
- To get reviews - Pitchup.com- review a campsite and win a tent
- To generate buzz- the Hoxton Hotel competition- first set-number of entries win a room for a £1 and, of course moonfruit- enter anyone that mentions you into a prize draw (This doesn't necessarily have to happen on Twitter, but the real-time nature of it really helps to add momentum)
- To receive blog engagement- New Scientist - win a piece of moon rock

If you have any other examples of using 'positive motivational influences' to encourage certain kinds of user behavior, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

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It wasn't that long ago that the notion of users contributing, providing reviews and helping others, were considered crazy. Why would anyone do it, and even if they did, why would anyone else value those contributions, especially against similar from "authorities."

Now, such interactions have helped to make Amazon as successful as it is. Following that lead, Intuit tapped into everyday users providing much of the advice to other users. And of course, it has expanded in leaps and bounds from there.

Providing a way for your site users, which may also be those most "fanatical" about your product or service, to participate and contribute may be one of the most important moves any site could make.

If there is one thing people love to share, it's the creative uses or unique solutions that they may have come up with for your products. What better way to get involvement than to hold contests or just seek users contributions around those ideas. And savvy companies know to use this as an extension of product development.

I agree competition are great but they also add a logistical and technical committment to the process. There is nothing worse than disappointing a hopeful winner. Talking from experience here. It's a tremendous de-motivator if not handled properly.

Just a caveat, though. It is so important that - whatever initiatives we undertake - we don't come across as if we ar trying to 'buy' or unduly influence reviewers by gifts, badges, etc. That approach is likely to have a boomerang effect and could in the long run harm our efforts.

I really like the idea of a point system for comments that allows you to earn extra points if people like your comment. Earning points is psychologically rewarding and being able to ascend the leader board can trigger our competitive and self-actualization drive.

Has anyone read through the recent FTC decision that bloggers who endorse products must disclose payments? I wonder how far that goes and how that would impact some of the incentives you might give to build links.

I think the use of MozPoints on SEOmoz are especially useful for increasing interactivity and giving something back to the users. When a user reaches 100 MozPoints they get a do follow link back to their site. Such a great idea!

Another site that does this well is Bodubuilding.com. They too have a rating system for users that increases not only the quantity of posts in the forum but also the quality.

In my opinion just asking for users to participate is critical; it's much like a call to action for sales. A blog that encourages me to leave my thoughts is almost always more likely to receive a comment from me then one that does not. If you ask your readers to exchange ideas they will. Havinga "comment" form at the end is not enough.

As part of the contest idea, ask users to blog about your product/service and who ever comes up with the best idea (could be community moderated) wins a free something or the company agrees to create within reason the new product/feature.

We recently did a promotion for a client, Wii-A-Day (give away a Wii a day for 2 months) We saw a ton of success with social networking and e-newsletter sign ups. Providing some sort of incentive is key to increasing user engagement and participation. I definitely recommend it for other emarketers!

We run a user-generated content site with 25,000+ members, and have been doing so for a long time.

I can tell you straightaway that almost all of this article is bad advice. This is the first really bad article I've come across on SEOmoz.

For example, a "Review of the Week" is a winner-take-all type of incentive. One person wins and everybody else loses out. Choosing an article fairly to the satisfaction of all is basically impossible, especially if you have to do it every week. People will question if you are biased - and of course you are because you choose an article for subjective reasons - and you go from being a neutral platform provider to playing kingmaker.

If you're going to antagonize the bulk of your members, you might as well forget about user-generated content and pay one or a handful of qualified users (those referred to as "top reviewers" in the article) to write content.

And so on.

SEOmoz, articles about UGC should be left to people who run UGC sites.

Hey Sputnik, Not to call into question your experience but you've made 5 or so comments on Seomoz and already your telling them what they should and shouldnt write?? However I'd agree with Lucy - if you disagree with the above ideas, love to hear alternatives, not all of them are ideal - and thats why they're ideas - not "things you must must do". Even I find my clients are different so not all Lucy's ideas are transferable - however you never know when some idea does turn out to be actionable or sparks of another idea! :) An interesting current example of Editors picking a "best of" and it really working is the hunt for the new SEOchick over at www.seo-chicks.com - now thats one thats not pissing off the users, and likely to succeed quite well!

Don't quite see how the number of comments I've made on SEOmoz affects the relevancy of what I have to say.

My comment was intended for anyone reading this article - to ensure they take it with a grain of salt. I've read bad articles in the past, swallowed what they said hook line and sinker, and ended up paying dearly in terms of time wasted when it turned out to be all wrong.

I don't see the problem of me adding balance to this article, by sharing my perspective.

wow, noob :P is basically all the answer you deserve (however i realise thats not really helpful to others reading this)

Anyways. Almost all succesfull sites are UGC to some degree or other.

The amount of UGC or user interaction you can generate is even starting to become a measurement for success.

All the points above are completely fine, as long as you adapt them for your own business and take your customers into account - but thats so obvious that it would be moronic to state it here.

So in your account with your single website maybe these dont fully apply to you.

However ive used similar tactics to these on a range of websites from small to global brands, from fully UGC driven sites to sites with only small amounts of ugc. - maybe everyone involved didnt realise the massive brand killing actions we were taking :P

Your comment that a "Review of the Week" is a winner-take-all type of incentive - is certainly true, but that doesnt mean its a bad idea. Maybe it is for your website but not for all websites

You go from being a neutral platform provider to playing kingmaker - maybe this doesnt work in your situation, but there are sites where being neutral would be counterproductive and people come to you for exactly the reason that you do play kingmaker

"Antagonisizing the bulk of your members" - ive never felt antagonised when SEOMoz promotes a post from youmoz to the main blog - ive thanked them for being kingmakers and bringing good content to my attention

I concede that for global brands with strong brand capital, where the decision-making of the management behind the brand is not subject to question, the advice in this article may be relevant. However, most people don't have the luxury of working with that kind of asset.

So for most people going into UGC, any system has to be engineered to take into considerations the feelings of the majority of the userbase, and to be absolutely fair - like the points system on SEOmoz, for instance.